Do you want your audience to be engaged or bored?

Effective L&D content relies on creating an emotional connection between your material and your intended audience. Learning and development has always had an uphill battle to fight to interest its core audience. Those who create it successfully have learned that forming an emotional connection cannot be an afterthought – it is the deciding factor between an engaged audience and a bored one.

Of course, creating an emotional connection is easier said than done. Continue reading to learn ways to use modern technology and learning strategies to improve the emotional connection of your L&D content. This will not only increase the engagement of your material but its profitability for your brand as well.

Emotional connection is…complex.

The reason L&D content has such a hard time creating an emotional connection is that emotions are not learned the same way that facts or names are. Recent studies by educational institutions like ACDC suggest that emotion drives learning retention on a basic biological level, meaning that learners who are emotionally engaged retain more.

This is why learning and working environments that are emotionally stressful are less productive than calming ones. It’s also why overly controlled learning environments may increase efficiency but lower creativity and engagement.

To make your learning content more productive, here are three ways to increase an emotional connection with your audience.

1. Make the content personal

Personal L&D content stands a better chance of creating an emotional connection, which will help employees and customers retain your information.

If your learning content stems from job opportunities, for example, demonstrate how those jobs offer specific advancement opportunities. If your content is all about sharing your brand or identity, focus on how your services will impact your audience.

Replace lists of features with lists of uses to create engagement with an audience who is listening for ways that your services can improve their lives.

2. Make the content relevant

Relevance comes in many forms when it comes to L&D content. We’ve already talked about making content personal. Making it technologically relevant can be just as impactful.

Use modern technology to your advantage in your L&D content, such as by using a service like Aquifer to create 3D avatars that you can use to communicate information more uniquely.

The ability to face-capture a 3D avatar that represents your brand and speak through them in your L&D content can majorly impact how engaged your audience is.

Test for results

Your methods of adding emotional content to your L&D material may require testing to get the right balance of informative and engaging for your target audience. However, the audience itself can be tested too.

Schools have always known that a little quiz keeps learning mechanisms working properly. You don’t have to test your audience like that but adding a little testing psychology to your L&D content can help retention, which can help create an emotional connection.

Consider posing questions to your audience rather than just statements. Find ways to make your viewers think, rather than do all the thinking for them.

Schedule a demo with Aquifer today to see how you can use modern technology to enhance your L&D content and form the connections that create retention and brand engagement in the modern day.